Greed, the Final Frontier?
In my last post I briefly touched on wealth inequality and I really wanted to expand my thinking on this topic. I’ll first state I’m going to have a certain thought basis given the lower – middle class status of my family growing up and how my income hasn’t ever exceeded $38,000 a year. I state this because I can easily understand how someone who comes from a wealthy family or who is more independently wealthy may have a hard time understanding my points because I often have a hard time understanding theirs. It’s difficult to see the problem when that problem doesn’t directly affect you and on the flip side of that, it’s difficult to not see a problem when being directly affected by it. Our individual experiences are what define our views and perspectives, so for me I can safely say that growing up in a lower middle-class family has helped mold my thinking to be a minimalist and I’ve learned to appreciate the smaller things in life because I hold on to the believe that money doesn’t have to define success. My definition of success is having happiness in my life and I believe essentially that is everyone’s main goal. Although I agree with the statement “money doesn’t buy happiness” I can acknowledge what money does do, money is the ultimate tool we use to acquire our basic needs to then have the freedom to better investigate, try and pursue our own individual happiness.
If you follow Maslow’s hierarchy of needs then you can understand that our basic needs of survival (food, water, warmth, rest, security and safety) must be met to reach self-fulfillment or actual happiness. Wither we like it or not, money is how the world works. We ultimately must make it and use it to meet our basic needs. When we start having problems getting our basic needs, it affects our psychological needs and it becomes a downward spiral. We aren’t working together as a collective to help us all achieve happiness. We are confused as a culture and need to really see the problem for what it is. Why should we all have to fight and grind to be happy? People are simply greedy, and our system is designed to keep it that way. I run a personal thought experiment all the time where I imagine the things I’d be able to do with simply taking my income and essentially doubling it. This is where my views and basis comes into play because it’s easy for me to envision a more finical stress free situation with only 60,000 a year and can’t even begin to fathom what I’d do making millions, so I find the higher the salary of an individual the more it is impossible to help but notice they are making so much more money than will ever be needed in a life time. Greed molds a style of thinking that power and money lead to happiness and that is the ultimate fallacy. How do I know that? Well don’t take my word for it, USA today published (Click Here) a psychological study from Purdue University found that there is a “golden wage” in which anything made beyond it would no longer play any role into factoring someone’s happiness. They calculated were to draw the line in having self-fulfillment. That wage is $105,000 a year. Knowing this number, could you understand why we may have a greed problem when Time.com says the average CEO of a fortune 500 company last year made $14 million and how that is roughly 133 times more than the golden wage, when I making almost $16 an hour can’t afford an apartment on my own? Greed is an addiction. Greed has you always looking for the next fix and convincing yourself it’s never enough. Greed makes you want it all, so you keep taking and taking and justifying why you’re taking and taking. Greed doesn’t like to be noticed or called out, so it hides itself and masquerades behind ideas such as: being driven, hardworking, ambitious and most importantly happy. I say you make too much money and you tell me I’m lazy and entitled. One can still believe in ideas like working hard, being driven or having ambition while also noticing that having a salary that is 133 times the golden wage is overkill. People are getting paid these crazy amounts of money while some of us are trying to just keep a roof over our heads. That is where it becomes a worry for me, this is why I want to talk about it and get people to start asking questions. Why is everyone okay with how underfunded education is and how over-funded defense is? We’ve undervalued education to an absurd degree. Why would providing a system to where people don’t have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars to stay healthy is such a problem? These things are only problems, because someone may lose money for fixing them. I can’t say it enough, its simply greed. Pride and personal well-being over humility and overall well-being. I wouldn’t care what a CEO was making if it didn’t cost me almost everything I made to keep up with my basic needs.
The challenge here is noting how easy it is to raise the cost of basic goods and how extremely complex it would be to counter balance and raise wages. I like to use the metaphor of weight loss to explain my point. It is much easier to gain weight than it is to lose it. Consuming a calorie is far easier than burning one. On top of that, each body is different and requires different understandings and practices to know what would work to lose weight. One health study will tell you to eat multiple small meals a day to lose weight, while another one will tell you that fasting for most of the day is the way to lose weight. There will always be negative forces in play that people must be worked around to solve the problem. I bring up these points to explain why I believe only raising minimum wage isn’t going to work. It doesn’t account for all the complexities of wages in general. The minimum wage where I’m from is now currently $10.25/hr. and that increase happened on July 1st of 2017; before then the minimum wage was $9.75/hr. My current wage is $15.50/hr. and when the minimum increased by $.50/hr. my wage stayed at $15.50/hr. I went from making $5.25 above minimum wage to now only making $4.75 above minimum wage. On the surface I can see that this logic appears to be advocating for the exact opposite of those fighting for wealth equality. I should be content with taking this $.50 reduction because it then redistributes the wealth for those less fortunate than me. Although from a narrow prospective it looks like I am taking a more conservative view, but that doesn’t actually consider the whole picture because wages aren’t that simple, especially when other much needed factors haven’t been added to the equation. For starters I’m nowhere near the golden wage, so I’m still working on the climb and it still affects people who aren’t drastically living above their means. The other problem is factoring in what basic needs are costing. One of the most pragmatic and frustrating factors I see is the cost of housing.
In this study (Click Here) it shows that on average I would need to make a minimum of $19.78/hr. to be able to afford my basic need of shelter in my state. That is $4.28 under what I’m making and where I currently live most one bed room apartments are over 1,000 dollars a month. Not only that, but you are still required to provide proof of income where you must make three times the rent. Which doing the math one would have to roughly make $14,680 above the current minimum wage to prove that. This is a problem and its how our system is set up. I can’t take credit for the core idea I’m about to describe, but I’m going to share it because I completely agree with it and I think it helps explain a lot. The only factor we use to gage success within a business is profit. We use no other system to calculate success. I’m not disagreeing that profit isn’t important, but when that becomes the sole and only measurement of how a company or business is valued; how would that not be the perfect environment to breed greed? It isn’t a false statement to say the rich are getting richer and the poor our getting poorer either and if you don’t want to take my word for it, look at this article in Forbes (Click Here).
That article also goes into detail explaining a big problem I notice when having discussions about this topic and that’s the confusion between the understanding of “same” and “equal”. A close friend of mine believes there isn’t wealth inequality because we all have the same opportunity to get wealth and the problem is that many simply haven’t learned how to properly navigate the opportunities. My issue with what my friend believes is “same opportunity” isn’t on an even playing field as “equal opportunity”. They’re two different ideas and one doesn’t justify the other. Claiming that we all have the same opportunities is sound. Even saying that many haven’t navigated these same opportunities is sound, but they are different points and aren’t answers to why it’s not unequal. To go back to my metaphor in my last blog post, some people can simply take an elevator straight to these opportunities while others have to take the stairs while more and more floors are constantly being added as you climb. Yes, all the opportunities at the top are the same, but how you get to them isn’t. Even if I learned how to navigate and move efficiently up the staircase, people on the elevator will always get to the top so much faster. Or even bringing back my weight lose metaphor. We all have the same ability to be able to lose weight, but they are by no means equal. Some people will hire personal trainers, shop at healthier stores and others simply won’t be able to do that.
Getting a college education is one of the many floors also being added for those of us who have to take the stairs to opportunity. I don’t need to pull up a study for people to understand how expensive it is to get a higher education. As I stated earlier if I need to make around 15,000 above minimum wage to be able to afford an apartment on my own, how can I also tackle what it would cost to go to college? Now let me talk about taxes. Let’s take the most recent tax cut for example. Why anyone would think trickle-down economics would work is just beyond me. That tax cut had nothing to do for the American people and it isn’t like they were being shy about that either, one of the tax write offs involves buying a private jet. The idea is just simple manipulation of truth. None of those companies have given wage increases after getting these tax cuts. Some have given one-time bonuses and others have stated they will use that for job growth, but even that will continue to further the problem. Why? Well If my company got millions back on this tax cut and created 300 new jobs with it, on the surface that sounds amazing, but we have an inequality with wages and with what our basic needs cost, so creating those jobs, just puts more people in the same position as a lot of us are in now. It doesn’t solve the problem, it simply adds more people to it. Instead of actually tackling what is happening we this distorted ideas that things are being done and half ass programs that have no incentive to leave them and no incentives to actually improve people’s situations.
If you’ve read this far you either get my points or you don’t and that is completely okay. Views should be different, and they should be challenged. No one should be attacked for challenging them, so I want to challenge you. If you find that all I’m doing is bitching, you aren’t wrong, but these things need to be bitched about. If wanting everyone to have an equal footing to achieve happiness labels me a social justice warrior than I guess that is what I am. I’m not angry with anyone who sees what I’m saying and thinks I’m entitled or lazy. I want that to be known because a lot of people are angry and wither that anger is justified or not it doesn’t help anything on either side. When I talk about wealth inequality, I’m more focused on how unequal the path is to these opportunities and not the opportunities themselves. Life is short, so I don’t consider myself lazy or entitled for wanting to be in a position where I’m able to spend more time enjoying it and less time having to grind through it. It makes me an optimist with hope that humans have shaped the world to be what it is, so we also have the power to reshape it. I would love to live in a world where I can choose to work 40 hours a week, and not absolutely have to. Where I don’t have to feel stress and can focus on my happiness because I know my basic needs are met. I want a world where we choose to protect the well-being of people and our planet over profit or am I the only one?
If you follow Maslow’s hierarchy of needs then you can understand that our basic needs of survival (food, water, warmth, rest, security and safety) must be met to reach self-fulfillment or actual happiness. Wither we like it or not, money is how the world works. We ultimately must make it and use it to meet our basic needs. When we start having problems getting our basic needs, it affects our psychological needs and it becomes a downward spiral. We aren’t working together as a collective to help us all achieve happiness. We are confused as a culture and need to really see the problem for what it is. Why should we all have to fight and grind to be happy? People are simply greedy, and our system is designed to keep it that way. I run a personal thought experiment all the time where I imagine the things I’d be able to do with simply taking my income and essentially doubling it. This is where my views and basis comes into play because it’s easy for me to envision a more finical stress free situation with only 60,000 a year and can’t even begin to fathom what I’d do making millions, so I find the higher the salary of an individual the more it is impossible to help but notice they are making so much more money than will ever be needed in a life time. Greed molds a style of thinking that power and money lead to happiness and that is the ultimate fallacy. How do I know that? Well don’t take my word for it, USA today published (Click Here) a psychological study from Purdue University found that there is a “golden wage” in which anything made beyond it would no longer play any role into factoring someone’s happiness. They calculated were to draw the line in having self-fulfillment. That wage is $105,000 a year. Knowing this number, could you understand why we may have a greed problem when Time.com says the average CEO of a fortune 500 company last year made $14 million and how that is roughly 133 times more than the golden wage, when I making almost $16 an hour can’t afford an apartment on my own? Greed is an addiction. Greed has you always looking for the next fix and convincing yourself it’s never enough. Greed makes you want it all, so you keep taking and taking and justifying why you’re taking and taking. Greed doesn’t like to be noticed or called out, so it hides itself and masquerades behind ideas such as: being driven, hardworking, ambitious and most importantly happy. I say you make too much money and you tell me I’m lazy and entitled. One can still believe in ideas like working hard, being driven or having ambition while also noticing that having a salary that is 133 times the golden wage is overkill. People are getting paid these crazy amounts of money while some of us are trying to just keep a roof over our heads. That is where it becomes a worry for me, this is why I want to talk about it and get people to start asking questions. Why is everyone okay with how underfunded education is and how over-funded defense is? We’ve undervalued education to an absurd degree. Why would providing a system to where people don’t have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars to stay healthy is such a problem? These things are only problems, because someone may lose money for fixing them. I can’t say it enough, its simply greed. Pride and personal well-being over humility and overall well-being. I wouldn’t care what a CEO was making if it didn’t cost me almost everything I made to keep up with my basic needs.
The challenge here is noting how easy it is to raise the cost of basic goods and how extremely complex it would be to counter balance and raise wages. I like to use the metaphor of weight loss to explain my point. It is much easier to gain weight than it is to lose it. Consuming a calorie is far easier than burning one. On top of that, each body is different and requires different understandings and practices to know what would work to lose weight. One health study will tell you to eat multiple small meals a day to lose weight, while another one will tell you that fasting for most of the day is the way to lose weight. There will always be negative forces in play that people must be worked around to solve the problem. I bring up these points to explain why I believe only raising minimum wage isn’t going to work. It doesn’t account for all the complexities of wages in general. The minimum wage where I’m from is now currently $10.25/hr. and that increase happened on July 1st of 2017; before then the minimum wage was $9.75/hr. My current wage is $15.50/hr. and when the minimum increased by $.50/hr. my wage stayed at $15.50/hr. I went from making $5.25 above minimum wage to now only making $4.75 above minimum wage. On the surface I can see that this logic appears to be advocating for the exact opposite of those fighting for wealth equality. I should be content with taking this $.50 reduction because it then redistributes the wealth for those less fortunate than me. Although from a narrow prospective it looks like I am taking a more conservative view, but that doesn’t actually consider the whole picture because wages aren’t that simple, especially when other much needed factors haven’t been added to the equation. For starters I’m nowhere near the golden wage, so I’m still working on the climb and it still affects people who aren’t drastically living above their means. The other problem is factoring in what basic needs are costing. One of the most pragmatic and frustrating factors I see is the cost of housing.
In this study (Click Here) it shows that on average I would need to make a minimum of $19.78/hr. to be able to afford my basic need of shelter in my state. That is $4.28 under what I’m making and where I currently live most one bed room apartments are over 1,000 dollars a month. Not only that, but you are still required to provide proof of income where you must make three times the rent. Which doing the math one would have to roughly make $14,680 above the current minimum wage to prove that. This is a problem and its how our system is set up. I can’t take credit for the core idea I’m about to describe, but I’m going to share it because I completely agree with it and I think it helps explain a lot. The only factor we use to gage success within a business is profit. We use no other system to calculate success. I’m not disagreeing that profit isn’t important, but when that becomes the sole and only measurement of how a company or business is valued; how would that not be the perfect environment to breed greed? It isn’t a false statement to say the rich are getting richer and the poor our getting poorer either and if you don’t want to take my word for it, look at this article in Forbes (Click Here).
That article also goes into detail explaining a big problem I notice when having discussions about this topic and that’s the confusion between the understanding of “same” and “equal”. A close friend of mine believes there isn’t wealth inequality because we all have the same opportunity to get wealth and the problem is that many simply haven’t learned how to properly navigate the opportunities. My issue with what my friend believes is “same opportunity” isn’t on an even playing field as “equal opportunity”. They’re two different ideas and one doesn’t justify the other. Claiming that we all have the same opportunities is sound. Even saying that many haven’t navigated these same opportunities is sound, but they are different points and aren’t answers to why it’s not unequal. To go back to my metaphor in my last blog post, some people can simply take an elevator straight to these opportunities while others have to take the stairs while more and more floors are constantly being added as you climb. Yes, all the opportunities at the top are the same, but how you get to them isn’t. Even if I learned how to navigate and move efficiently up the staircase, people on the elevator will always get to the top so much faster. Or even bringing back my weight lose metaphor. We all have the same ability to be able to lose weight, but they are by no means equal. Some people will hire personal trainers, shop at healthier stores and others simply won’t be able to do that.
Getting a college education is one of the many floors also being added for those of us who have to take the stairs to opportunity. I don’t need to pull up a study for people to understand how expensive it is to get a higher education. As I stated earlier if I need to make around 15,000 above minimum wage to be able to afford an apartment on my own, how can I also tackle what it would cost to go to college? Now let me talk about taxes. Let’s take the most recent tax cut for example. Why anyone would think trickle-down economics would work is just beyond me. That tax cut had nothing to do for the American people and it isn’t like they were being shy about that either, one of the tax write offs involves buying a private jet. The idea is just simple manipulation of truth. None of those companies have given wage increases after getting these tax cuts. Some have given one-time bonuses and others have stated they will use that for job growth, but even that will continue to further the problem. Why? Well If my company got millions back on this tax cut and created 300 new jobs with it, on the surface that sounds amazing, but we have an inequality with wages and with what our basic needs cost, so creating those jobs, just puts more people in the same position as a lot of us are in now. It doesn’t solve the problem, it simply adds more people to it. Instead of actually tackling what is happening we this distorted ideas that things are being done and half ass programs that have no incentive to leave them and no incentives to actually improve people’s situations.
If you’ve read this far you either get my points or you don’t and that is completely okay. Views should be different, and they should be challenged. No one should be attacked for challenging them, so I want to challenge you. If you find that all I’m doing is bitching, you aren’t wrong, but these things need to be bitched about. If wanting everyone to have an equal footing to achieve happiness labels me a social justice warrior than I guess that is what I am. I’m not angry with anyone who sees what I’m saying and thinks I’m entitled or lazy. I want that to be known because a lot of people are angry and wither that anger is justified or not it doesn’t help anything on either side. When I talk about wealth inequality, I’m more focused on how unequal the path is to these opportunities and not the opportunities themselves. Life is short, so I don’t consider myself lazy or entitled for wanting to be in a position where I’m able to spend more time enjoying it and less time having to grind through it. It makes me an optimist with hope that humans have shaped the world to be what it is, so we also have the power to reshape it. I would love to live in a world where I can choose to work 40 hours a week, and not absolutely have to. Where I don’t have to feel stress and can focus on my happiness because I know my basic needs are met. I want a world where we choose to protect the well-being of people and our planet over profit or am I the only one?
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